A Deeper Look at the New Google

Google’s Holding Company – Alphabet

Prior to the death of Apple’s Steve Jobs, he had informed Google co-founder and CEO, Larry Page that his company had been trying to do too many things and as Page later told the Financial Times in his reply that `if they did just the same things they had done before and did not do something new, it would seem like a crime to him’. Yet Page acknowledges that Jobs could have been right to a certain extent – he would manage only so many things before too many of it would get lost in the shuffle.

These two desires , one to do new things irrespective of how weird and unrelated it could seem to Google’s core search and advertising business and still find a way in managing them to completion, explains the surprise announcement of Page’s that he intend creating a holding company by the name Alphabet. 

This would separate Google’s profitable ad-related businesses, which include mobile software as well as the video site YouTube from the company’s range of efforts on human longevity, internet access balloon, self-driving cars; the Nest connected home devices etc. where each of them will probably be a separate holdings

First Step in Fulfilling the Company’s Long-Standing Goal

However, the move, though applauded by investors, is just the first step in fulfilling the company’s long-standing goal in making Google a long term success as well as the world a better place’.According to several management experts, Alphabet would be successful if the individual project and companies would be successful enough on their own to become freestanding companies, ultimately and the new corporate organization qualifies that to occur though it does not guarantee it. 

At first, it is essential to dismiss the notion which Page together with co-founder Sergey Brin had developed such as the Berkshire Hathaway of the Internet, an updated version of Warren Buffett’s company. A professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Michael A. Cusumano commented that `the comparison seemed to be silly and Buffett invests in existing, undervalued companies something like mutual fund is the opposite of Alphabet’s VC-style focus on risky new ventures like Calico.

New Businesses Tend to Get Short Shrift in Resources

According to David B. Yoffie, professor of international business administration at Harvard Business School, states that if Page and Brin attempt to run alphabet similar to an updated Berkshire Hathaway or General Electric, which is a more tech focused company, they would run into trouble. 

They have been running differently from successful tech companies and that he is doubtful since it is difficult to have a company structure in the tech world’. Regardless of closely related businesses, companies like Microsoft, Samsung, and IBM together with Hewlett-Packard have found it difficult to succeed. 

Moreover, they have also found it difficult to capitalize on updated products and services. According to Yoffie, new businesses have a tendency of getting short shrift in resources as well as management consideration. 

This is specifically what Page as well as Brin intends to avoid with Alphabet. Page had written in a blog post which means `alpha-bet’ or an attempt to get returns above `alpha’ – a normal target. In any circumstance, the reorganization sets Google/Alphabet on the track which may not be easy to change in the future if it does not tend to work since it will be more than a just a promise of reporting Google’s financial result and the alpha-bets separately.

Apple May Enlist Siri to Answer Your Phone Calls

Apple’s Voicemail & Transcription Service – Siri

Apple is said to be planning a voice mail and transcription service which would utilise Siri as a personalized answering machine. According to Business Insider, the tech giant company will be testing a voice mail service wherein Apple’s digital assistant on the iPhone and iPad, Siri, would be responding to incoming phone calls with a personal message, if the recipient is not available or does not prefer chatting.

An updated service known as iCloud Voicemail would record your voice mail into text which can be read in leisure. Besides Siri there is other voice assistant in town which faces competition from two other main rivals. Google Now is a feature running Google’s Android software though it is also available for iPhone and iPads.

Microsoft’s Cortana has gone beyond Windows mobile phone on Windows 10 computers as well as tablets. Moreover, Cortana would also be available as an iOS app somewhere later this year. Hence Apple needs to continue innovating Siri to portray that it could do more than just answering queries put across to it. Voice mail could be a good niche for Siri, provided the transcription is reliable and accurate.

iCloud Service & Siri Integration

According to Business Insider, Siri would answer the incoming calls though not with standard messages. The iCloud Voice mail would share information with certain people like where you are and why you can’t answer the call right away.

The voice mail in turn sends it to Apple server where Siri thereafter converts the voice message into text, displaying them on the iPhone to be read just the way one would read a text message or email. As per reports from Business Insider, the new iCloud service and Siri integration is presently being tested by the employees of Apple, intending to launch it somewhere in 2016.

They further added that they heard about Apple employees using the service some weeks ago and presuming this information to be right, it would mean that we would be able to tap into the service when the next mobile operating system, iOS 10 of Apple will be launched later next year.

Viewing Voice Mail as Text – Easy

Presently one can prompt Siri to play the voice messages so that the user does not have to manually activate them. Viewing the voice mail as text would tend to be much easier than having to play and replay the message in its initial audio format. Voice mail transcription service has already been offered by Google through it Google voice service.

 In this regards, no comments have been provided by Apple.Enabling voice-to-text, a main option on smartphones would help businesses to overcome the increased interest in messaging and the declining interest in actual voice calls. A Pew survey from 2012 had indicated a decreasing interest in voice calling with 26% of teens stating that they talked daily with friends on their cell phones, down from 38% of teens surveyed in 2009.

Achieving voice transcription and enabling it to work as promised is a vast undertaking. Hence  most of them expects that iCloud Voicemail is included with iOS 10 and not as a part of incremental upgrades in iOS 9. Lead Apple analyst at technology research firm Gartner, Van Baker, states that `if Siri were to add a voice-to-text feature, its counterparts Google Now and Microsoft Cortana would be likely to add similar options’.

Computer Scientists Introduce New Graphics Software

New graphic software has been unveiled by the computer scientist from the University of Massachusetts Amrest, which promises to deliver exciting results and a great number of application. This new software-modeling program uses a sophisticated geometric matching and machine learning which provides it the ability to mimic the human perception of style. This advanced graphics software will offer a range of powerful new tools to the users for comparing the similarity of the three dimensional (3D) objects.

Lead scientist develops smart computational techniques

The team of researchers was led by Evangelos Kalogerakis who is an expert in developing computational techniques. These techniques are used to analyze and synthesize the visual content along with focusing on the machine learning algorithms, which allow users in creating 3D models. In order to develop this new exciting software researcher drew observation about the style similarity in the art history and appraisal literature. This observation was vital in finding the geometrical elements, which include the shapes, lines, proportion, as well as visual motifs, which helped the software in understanding the stylistic similarity.

To improve the functionality and effectiveness of this software crowd-sourcing was utilized wherein more than 2500 people participated which include the ordinary people to artists. The aim of this crowd-sourcing was to present object’s style comparisons by studying the responses which happened to be more than 50,000 on seven structurally diverse categories.

These categories included buildings, lamps, cutlery, furniture, dishes, lamps, architectural pillars and coffee sets. This test was a complete success with human correspondents agreeing on its style similarity on an average of 85% of the time.

New graphics software brings more favorable design within short time

Being a software tool, the responses generated by the human evaluations were excellent with 90% of agreement rate. Which means this software was able to process the design of different structures and offer an end result which was excessively favorable as per the human perception. Kalogerakis was upbeat by this result and even stated that this software can become the next alternative style expert on providing suggestions of objects to populate the home, dining or even the virtual reality environment.

The future prospects of this new graphics software
 
For a long time computer graphics algorithms are being used to create movies, games, visual effects and augmented reality environments. It is even used in manufacturing real objects or designing architectural scenery. But with the advent of this new algorithm far greater things can be done with much more precision and effect than we can do now.

This software graphics tool can be used for exploring the databases of digital representation of buildings, pillar and other surrounding objects as per the style attributes. Creating content for the computer games will becomes much easier and advanced while the augmented reality can be simply populated with more advanced virtual objects as per the style taste. Robots running on this computer algorithm can easily recognize their environment and can maneuver new ways to move around and pick objects.

Apple invents stylus capable of simulating onscreen textures through haptic feedback

Apple’s Patent Application – Touch Implement with Haptic Feedback

A new patent application of Apple submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office plans an intelligent news stylus which would bring about onscreen textures on devices such as the iPad. The patent application for `Touch implement with haptic feedback for simulating surface texture’ specifies a stylus input device with on-board electronics which tend to enable it to sense contact with a touchscreen, collect information with regards to displayed texture and output vibratory feed related to said texture.

The stylus employing haptic technology could also connect to devices through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The stylus tends to contain contact sensors, to control when the device touches down on a target surface, while other implementations depend on capacitive sensors, pressure sensors as well as cameras in determining when it touches a target surface like the iPad’s touchscreen.

The sensors like photodiodes could be used to determine textures such as wood, glass, cotton, paper, silk and much more. When a texture is determined, the touch implement tends to activate a haptic feedback mechanism to communicate corresponding vibrations, auditory signals to the user. Feedback profiles could differ based on textures, which means rougher depicted textures could activate more dramatic vibrations while surfaces such as glass could raise little to no feedback.

Granular Experience – Feedback Profiles Changes Dramatically

Apple has recommended an equally granular experience wherein the feedback profiles could change dramatically as a stylus moves over varied portions on the surface of the screen. For instance, user would observe differing levels of feedback as they wrote on a scene showing wood, glass and parchment.

Moreover, the system is capable of adjusting haptic output created as it senses changes while writing pressure, angle or orientation. Patent application of Apple was first filed for, in January 2014, for a stylus with haptic feedback and credits go to Jason Lor, Patrick A. Carroll and Dustin J. Verhoeve as its inventors. The company’s texture-reading patent application quotes the same inventors together with Glen A. Rhodes.

In a related patent which was also published recently, Apple summaries a stylus input which works in the reverse to the method mentioned earlier, wherein instead of simulating sensed texture via vibratory feedback, it uses a camera module in its tip to interpret and record physical characteristic of virtually any object or surface, reproducing those properties that is visually on a computing device.

Apple to Debut Branded Stylus

In some embodiments the light tends to bounce off an object and passes through the clear tip or lens gathered by an embedded photo sensor and the image data is passed to a connected device to be processed in order to reproduce a three dimensional versions.

This includes image textures, colours and shape. Besides the exact object reproduction, the system is ideal in capturing textures as well as mapping them to graphical tool for illustration, photo editing or CAD software. Reports have indicated that Apple is gearing to debut a branded stylus when it reveals a larger 12.9 inch iPad model which is expected to be launched sometime this year.

Ming-Chi Kuo noted KGI analyst is of the belief that the initial release would be a simple model without communication potentials or on-board sensors with much advanced structures coming up in the succeeding generations.

First Look: The ONE Smart Piano

The One – Unique Digital Piano

Ambitious musicians intending to learn playing the piano can now check out `The One, which is a unique digital piano using iPad to compensation the learning curve connected in being proficient with the instrument. Usually to learn to play the piano one would need tutorials from a professional person. Digital lessons are now on the rise and this is a good means of learning to play the tune.

Earlier, several tried innovations were utilised in teaching tools such as Ion’s Piano Apprentice which was a system wherein LEDs were used on a 25-key, keyboard to guide the student in learning the skill. However the system was unrefined and the app it functioned with were not good at instructions. The new entry – The ONE Smart Piano’s new keyboard together with the accompanying lessons are an improvement to its predecessorsboth in terms of hardware as well as software.

`The ONE’ tends to ship in two versions, one a full size 88-key version with weighted keys which are velocity sensitive while The ONE Light is a 61-key, keyboard with non-weighted keys. The ONE Smart Piano models unlike the old Piano Apprentice which was sold at $69 are well made serious instruments, where lessons can be downloaded in a dedicated iOS app.

Classic Lesson – Video/Instructor

A classic lesson comprises of a video together with an instructor playing and showing the structure of it while teaching fingering with the LEDs on The ONE’ lighting up to guide the learner. Then turning off the LEDs enables the student to play unassisted which is similar to live teacher training the student. The iPad can get connected through a lightning cable though MicroUSB cables which are also included for Android usage.

The USB cable, a rather unusual choice, is a 3.0 desktop connector which is not seen before at the host end and lightning at the other and it is not clear on the option of using the on-the-go – OTG cable arrangement instead of the USB A connector that would have been available from all manufacturers. The app provided in The ONE Smart Piano with the ONE application enables the user to make a choice between Video tutorials, LED guided practice and KARA Game.

LED Guided Training

The LED guided training is a more traditional type of piano practice. The app tends to display sheet music, emphasizing the note on the staff display portraying the LEDs on the keyboard wherein the left hand notes turns to blue LED while the right hand notes indicated are in red LED and a female voice calls out numbers to support with fingering. Staff note exhibiting together with LED on the keyboard do not tend to change till the student plays them.

The staff music can be availed for in-app purchase at a cost of 99 cents. KARA Game is somewhat similar to Guitar Hero or Rock band for keyboard and the game seems to handle single player or two, playing sitting on the bench. The ONE, inspite of some very minor shortcomings, seems to be a very good learning tool for those interested in mastering the skills in playing the piano.